Abstract

Sustainability is about meeting the needs of today without compromising the needs of future generations. It involves focus on three main dimensions economic, environmental and social for achieving overall performance. Majority of the companies are adopting sustainability for business growth and boosting their corporate image for long term competitiveness, thereby receiving financial benefits as well. Sustainability is a concept that has come into picture a few years back and presently making a big mark in every field.
In the thesis, we propose a balanced scorecard framework for measuring sustainability performance of business organizations. We begin by studying, why the companies should invest in sustainability initiatives and what are the tools used for measuring sustainability. We investigate different scorecards for measuring sustainability and propose a new sustainability scorecard model to measure organization’s overall sustainable performance. Our sustainability scorecard encompasses four main dimensions namely organization, process, core and learning. Each of these dimension comprises of various indicators obtained from GRI and corporate reports of 100 most sustainable companies- Forbes. The application of the sustainability scorecard is performed via multi criteria decision making technique called- Analytical Network Process (ANP). A numerical study is provided.
The strength of the proposed model is that, - it overcomes the problems faced by the traditional balanced scorecards in sustainability evaluation of organizations. It provides a strong framework, has great flexibility and allows the opportunity to study the impact of one indicator over the other through the means of sensitivity analysis to identify improvements.